A newbie’s tale on Mood Boards and Inspiration

Lately I have been feeling inspired and creative, and what better way to channel this new energy, than to learn how to create mood boards in different themes.

A moodboard is a collection of pictures / images / text, related to a design theme. A moodboard is often used by a designer to help them design / style products. However I am not a designer or a creative head, but I am about to go into Boudoir photography so perfect timing to create different moodboards that can inspire various photo shoots.

Next step was finding a great tool to use. (note: newbie here). I took to the second best platform for answers, Twitter. I got various recommendations but decided to go with Picassa. Free download and quite easy to use.

Picasa is a free photo editing tool by Google. To create a collage, first you’ll need to find the images that inspire you or you are interested in pulling together to create your mood board and save them in a folder on your hard drive as .jpg images.

Next, open Picasa. On the left of your page, you should see a directory of the folders on your hard drive. Select the folder with the images you want to include in your collage.

Selecting the folder should populate that folders images in the main window. Hold down your <Ctrl> key to select multiple images. Once you’ve selected the images, click on the <Collage> icon at the bottom of the screen. From here you can move the images around, resize them, layer them, etc. Once you have the images the way you want them, simply click on <Create Collage>, on the left side bar. This will create a static image.

From here, you can crop the image to reduce white space or use any of the other Picasa photo editing tools. Lastly, you’ll need to save the board to your folder…and that’s it

Below are two mood boards I created.

First one is for visualizing a black and white nerdy vixen Boudoir session